"Eco-friendly touches?" Are we kidding?

A 'bizjet' is a federally-subsidized perk that allows a wealthy executive to take himself and his family (or maybe just his secretary) to some vacation spot without having to rub shoulders with the rest of us. (The federal government will cover 75% of the cost of putting a new bizjet into service, so long as the executive's accountant certifies that it is needed for "security." This was an amendment slipped into a post-9/11 bill by Oregon's Senator Packwood.) It isn't really for business, unless you believe that most business meetings occur in Aspen during ski season, on Martha's Vineyard on Sundays in August, or on Maui at Christmas--all times and places where you'll see whole flocks of 'bizjets.'

All this being so, rocketing around the world in what amounts to a private airliner, burning thousands of pounds of fuel per hour to transport just a few egos, is as far from "eco-friendly" as can be!

A friend of mine flies a Gulfstream for the aircraft's owner. He flew his employer and the employer's wife from New York back to their principal home in Denver a while back, with the departure time determined by the couple's desire to attend a party that evening. After dropping them off, my friend was directed to return to New York to run an errand: it seems that, in order to make the party on time, they'd had to leave New York a half-hour before the wife's favorite chocolate shop opened. So--

--my friend flew an aircraft weighing roughly 100,000 pounds on a round trip from Denver to New York and back, just to pick up a box of chocolate! (Apparently these people never heard of FedEx.)

Just remember, YOUR taxes helped pay for this extravagance...and all the eco-friendly touches in the world won't unburn all the fuel wasted on that absolutely unnecessary trip!

In case you think this is an isolated example, I should point out that another friend of mine flew a coast-to-coast round trip to fetch the owner's wife's poodle...and yes, I have many more examples.

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